Back-burning underway to control large Casterton blaze

The Department of Sustainability and Environment is conducting prescribed burns to try and control fires burning around Casterton. Incident controller Andrew Morrow expects it will be controlled today.

Department of Sustainability incident controller Andrew Morrow said it is conducting back-burning to create control lines around the fire.

"When that's completed, we estimate the area of the fire to be about 4,400 hectares."

"In the next few days we'll focus on consolidation of our control lines and getting some very thorough blacking out around the fire perimeter."

No private properties or homes have been threatened, but Mr Morrow says yesterday's wind caused the fire to spread.

He says the DSE doesn't expect there will be any further runs of fire.

"We had a persistent south-west wind we had some further runs of fire to the north-east and that was through some difficult woodland vegetation and swamps and it spotted out into a blue gum plantation and burnt approximately 100 hectares of that plantation.

"We don't anticipate any significant runs of fire as we did yesterday, winds have eased back, we'll be doing work with infrared cameras from the air and the ground looking at hotspots."